Stents are placed or implanted within a blood vessel for treating stenoses, strictures or aneurysms therein. They are implanted to reinforce collapsing, partially occluded, weakened, or dilated sections of a blood vessel. They have also been implanted in other bodily vessels including arteries, veins, biliary ducts, urethras, fallopian tubes, bronchial tubes, the trachea and the esophagus.
Stents are typically either self-expanding or mechanically expandable via the application of radially outward force from within the stent, as by inflation of a balloon. Hybrid stents, e.g. stents which are both self-expanding and mechanically expandable are also known.
An example of a balloon expandable stent is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,843,120. An example of a self-expanding stent is described in WO 96/26689.
It is desirable to provide a stent which is both flexible and compression resistant. The conventional approach to increasing compression resistance involves increasing the thickness of the struts of the stent. This approach, however, results in a less flexible stent. Similarly, the conventional approach to increasing flexibility, namely by decreasing the thickness of the struts, results in a stent with less compression resistance. Achieving both increased flexibility and increased compression resistance remains a difficult problem. There remains a need for inventive stent designs which demonstrate increased flexibility and increased compression resistance.
All US patents, applications and all other published documents mentioned anywhere in this application are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Without limiting the scope of the invention, a brief summary of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided as well for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. 1.72.